[Footnote: This passage contains only a repetition of what is far better
said in the preceding extract from Carlyle, but it was written before we
had read (if reviewers may be allowed to confess such ignorance) the
book from which that extract is taken.]
But while the imagination of man has thus the divine function of putting
thought into form, it has a duty altogether human, which is paramount to
that function--the duty, namely, which springs from his immediate
relation to the Father, that of following and finding out the divine
imagination in whose image it was made. To do this, the man must watch
its signs, its manifestations. He must contemplate what the Hebrew poets
call the works of His hands.
"But to follow those is the province of the intellect, not of the
imagination."--We will leave out of the question at present that poetic
interpretation of the works of Nature with which the intellect has
almost nothing, and the imagination almost everything, to do. It is
unnecessary to insist that the higher being of a flower even is
dependent for its reception upon the human imagination; that science may
pull the snowdrop to shreds, but cannot find out the idea of suffering
hope and pale confident submission, for the sake of which that darling
of the spring looks out of heaven, namely, God's heart, upon us his
wiser and more sinful children; for if there be any truth in this region
of things acknowledged at all, it will be at the same time acknowledged
that that region belongs to the imagination.
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